SAIT and the Sorbonne invite proposals for their international,interdisciplinary conference on â€œColor: Between Silence and Eloquenceâ€ inParis on June 25-26, 2009.

â€œColor is the material in, or rather of, painting, the irreduciblecomponent of representation that escapes the hegemony of language, the pureexpressivity of a silent visibility that constitutes the image as suchâ€Jacqueline Lichtenstein (The Eloquence of Color)

Following up on the analysis of text-and-image relationships as initiatedin the previous conferences on art writing, the 2009 international SAITconference will focus on color, envisaged as a transversal theme lendingitself to a multidisciplinary exploration in perspectives which may behistorical, artistic, philosophical, literary and/or linguistic. The goalof this conference is to analyze the role of color not only in the visualarts â€“ painting, sculpture, photography, and the cinema â€“ but also intexts, literary or theoretical, by taking the question of meaning andrepresentation down to its very limits, the ineffable.As a trace irreducible to language, a mark, a spot, or a flash of lightwhich resists both verbalization and the capture of the gaze, color makesthe (visual or textual) work of art oscillate between form and lack ofform, between the figurative and the figural, the visible and theinvisible, the readable and the unreadable, between eloquence and silence.Moreover, the ambivalence of color between light and matter conjures upboth the optical and the haptical function of the gaze, both the eye andthe hand, the sight and the touch in a dialectical to-and-fro movementcorresponding to two modes of viewing and apprehending the text.

We welcome submissions which relate color in art and color in texts, sinceit is at the junction between art, literature, and the discourse on artthat colorist aesthetics came into being (see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, TheEloquence of Color, The Blind Spot), from the Ancient quarrel betweendrawing and color (as early as in Platoâ€™s Cratylus) to the liberation ofcolor with the Modernists, via the famous conflict between Poussinists andRubenists. Along those lines, submissions may also examine the latent orpatent manifestations of the often overlooked, and yet, omnipresentambivalence of color between an intellectual, cerebral, rational,spiritual, purified, and dematerialized pole (austere and mysticalconception of color) and an unbridled, sensual, ludic, impulsive,naturalistic and anti-conformist pole (sensual and libertine conception ofcolor).We invite contributors to analyze the ways in which color can open a gap inthe image by tearing its legible surface and leaving in it a remainder or avacant space, as well as the ways in which color, the untamable, eludesâ€œobedience to wordsâ€ (see Jean-Pierre Guillerm), or is used by some writersto transcend generic boundaries, and in particular to break the limitsbetween the verbal and the visual. Within this view of color as silentinscription, one may consider the specificity of white, as both the archexpression of the inherent silence of colors and a metaphor of the writerâ€™sblock, and black, as both the saturation of meaning and a metaphor ofopacity and nonsense.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

- Color and the Discourse on Art- Color and Literature- Color and the Visual Arts- Color and Music- Color and Architecture- Color and Language- The History of Color

Registration fees are 15 euros (10 euros for doctoral students; members ofthe SAIT do not need to pay the registration fees: for more information onSAIT membership, please check out our website,http://www.textesetsignes.org; annual membership is 30 euros). Cheques arepayable to SAIT, and should be sent to Isabelle Gadoin, 22 rue Thierry,92160 ANTONY or handed in on arrival at the conference. The registrationfees do not include the cost of meals. A receipt will be issued on request.